v9.0.3 Release

[RuralWeb]

But the performance overhead became too great with large sites, and we had to move the duplicate check

OK - so you are making changes for these "large" sites but how do you define larges sites ie sites with large numbers of products OR sites which make Actinic money?

Adding/changing "features" to cater for the few sites with large numbers of products is counterproductive IMO as you will drive away the smaller users of the software who just want it to work. Actinic is sold as a cart for the small business user so lets keep it at that and forget the few who try and pack thousands and thousands of products in to make a few pennies dropshipping and then complain when actinic does not work when its was not inteneded for huge sites.

At the other end we have the small business who want some basic features adding like a mini cart, multi product images, auto downloading, auto image sizing, images in cart, google checkout, one page checkout etc etc etc - these are all proven to improve sales and are vailable now if you know what you are doing. If these were added more people would buy the software in the first place and then spend money to upgrade and move on. Many will never have a large ammount of products but will need multiuser or enterprise to cope with the large order numbers.

I have several clients poised to buy business plus with multiusers to handle orders or create other sites BUT with stupid things like this going on then they are looking elsewhere. Actinic have spent £300K on 9.0.3 and achieved nothing for the vast majority of users IMO

[RuralWeb]

I've posted a wish to have the duplicate check put back to the original method if anyone wants to add thier vote

[Jarvis]

Part 1, (I've seen this a few times and have seen similar on this thread)
Cloned a new site on a PC from a previously 'good' site in Actinic.
New site worked in 'Test' area on 'good' host.
Tried snapshot but failed 3 times. (Actinic crashed).
4th time okay.
Went to second PC, (Laptop used regularly for the same purpose, ie, work in front of telly).
Created a clean site.
Imported snapshot.
This resulted in 3 error messages on the Design tab 'Content Page'.

(A javascript Error has been found on the page (''Create Array' is undefined').
(A javascript Error has been found on the page ('Object Expected').
(A javascript Error has been found on the page ('Object Expected').

Part 2, (Now it gets interesting)
Using a mapped drive I replaced the whole of the New site's directory from the 'good' PC to the Laptop.
Reloaded Actinic, (without snapshot), Same errors on the Laptop.
The 'Good PC still has no errors.

[leehack]

I've found it seems to be more successful if you try to use a different snapshot name each time. Constantly fails if you stick with the first one you tried.

[Jarvis]

Thanks Lee, but I probably go overboard with Snapshots.
I take snapshots roughly every hour.
They are named say,
Nostalgia-01-12-v1-R.acd
Nostalgia-01-12-v2-LT.acd

This tells me what site, what date, what vesion and what PC.

[Jarvis]

Catalog - Internet Sales Application has encountered a problem and needs to close. We are sorry for the inconvenience.

How much longer is this damned stupid situation going to continue?
If Actinic are supposed to have spent £300k on v9.0.3, I'd like to know what on.
BTW, at say £30k pa per developer, that's 10 developers per year or 40 developers in the 3 months it took to get out!

For what it's worth, I make a living building Actinic shopping carts.
I have looked at my jobsheets and over 60% of my time has been in resolving Actinic 'bugs', anomolies and quirks, as well as sorting out client's Actinic problems.
40% of my time has been spent on designing.
Who do I send MY bill for fixing Actinic's broken bits.

Come on Actinic, pull yourselves together.
This is costing your clients money!

[Jarvis]

The Microsoft Jet database cannot find the input or query "Additional Tables". MAke sure it exists and that its name is spelled correctly.

Different site just doing a snapshot.
This getting really annoying!

[markburley]

We are also getting the same

"Actinic has encountered a problem and has closed. You will need to restart it.
Details of the problem have been saved to a *.dmp file, which you will find in 'C:\Program Files\Actinic v9\Catalog_9_0_3_0_0_0_IMMA.dmp'"


It has now been a week and still no solution - I have lost count as to how many times it has crashed today - fed up with having to take manual orders and tell customers I will have to call them back because the system is "down".

[Jan]

Different site just doing a snapshot.
This getting really annoying!

Your database is corrupt Jarvis, you need to compact and repair it, if you have done this already then you need to work out why it keeps becoming corrupt.

Regards,

[Jarvis]

Thanks for pointing me in the right direction Jan.
I was able to recover from a database on a different PC.
Although I lost a little layout work I had done, I was able to recover fairly quickly.
Daft really, I snapshot like mad but disregard the database backup as a separate option.

A little bit of experimenting last night revealed that the database issue was caused by upgrading from v7.
Different methods of importing produced different errors.
What IS consistant is that there was an error.

Fundamentally, v9.0.3 is more flawed than 9.0.2!

[Mark H]

I don't think you're alone there, a lot of people would assume that a snapshot imported over an existing site would replace the database.

[leehack]

I don't think you're alone there, a lot of people would assume that a snapshot imported over an existing site would replace the database.

You mean it doesn't?

[Jarvis]

It always used to.
In fact I just checked and it does.

Again, for the record, just published a site and snapshotted.
No problem.

Made one very minor change and went to publish.
Told me my permissions were wrong on the host.
(That's rubbish, my own Actinic purpose built server hosting 16 other of my sites).
Went to import last snapshot, wouldn't import, and had to go back to one hour previous.

Time spent today. one hour working, 3 hours fixing Actinic, and I still have to redo the one hour again.

Don't tell me this software has been tested.
I have been using Actinic for nearly 8 years and this is just not fair!

[leehack]

Roger do you think the image in your forum signature could be changed to 'commiserating nearly 8 years' please. I understand this might not be very ethical, but technically it's more precise. Thanks mate.

[chris ashdown]

Roger sorry off topic but if you use "Acronis" for your backups you can select what sites to backup every few mins if needed and it works in the background so no holdups, I think you will also find Norman uses it so it must be good

If you buy the workstation version you can make full backups of the hard disk and transfer the whole lot onto a new computer, if the worst ever happens, most backups would only restore to the same computer